Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Experiences of a store manager

When i left my job at Croma, as a store manager, after 3 years to join my dad, i left i with a bitter sweet feeling.
It had been a great experience, but there was so much more i could have done and learnt. Education does not prepare you for what you have to face.

Here is an article i had written after i left.

I started my work at Croma on 1st
June 2009.

I remember sitting at the conference room
at the SO, writing on the green pad 1/06/2009…my first day/my first job. It was
scary but at the same time I was excited. I knew I was about to enter a world I
had no knowledge of but a world that I would fit in anyway. And so wrong I was.

The project at Mumbai taught me about the
retail world and what should I expect from it? Did it teach me how to run a
store? No.

Did I make an effort to learn how a store
should run? Honestly No. I was busy trying to understand the little
details..the products, how to sell them, what customers expect…the discounts,
or markdowns as they are called in retail. Was that wrong? I don’t think so. It
was my first job, in a unknown sector, with lesser known products. I felt the
way to go about this was down to up. Know everything I have to know about the
products, and then other things like handling the store could be learnt – MY
FIRST MISTAKE. I placed learning about the products and learning about the
processes to run a store on an equal platform. Now, after 19 months I can confidently say, process
knowledge is 60%of the job, handling people 30% and product knowledge 10% or
even lesser.

I took over 'M' store, I knew I was
not ready but I also knew I would learn to sail once I was put on the boat. I
relied on my ADM who had been in the system for 3 years. I thought he was the
final authority on everything. My area manager, in fact told me to not
rely on him but on the SOPs - MY SECOND MISTAKE. I did not understand the significance
of what my area told me then. Processes are at the heart of running a store.
Processes form the order in the chaos. Processes maintain consistency. And it
is true not just for retail. Not even then did I go through and try to
understand the SOPs.

What I did learn from Megamall was how to
set up a store. It was store I had set up with my own hands, with my young team
of 20 staff. We had taken the store from a mere block of furniture to a well
merchandised store. The store manager of Juhu, the flagship store was
the closest to my store and he dropped in to help me understand how to
merchandise – MY THIRD MISTAKE. The fact that the operations head asked hin to drop in and
help me I took it on my ego. Did they think I was not capable of handling a
8000 sq foot store on my own? Honestly, of course I wasn’t. Shouldn’t I have
welcomed the help and learnt as much as I could from him? How many people got
the chance to interact and understand from a guy who handles a 20000 sq foot
store, a flagship store?

My learning – no one gives a damn about
your ego in the industry / company, especially when it is misplaced. That is
how the professional world works. Did I really expect my operations head to call me and
say that it was not the lack of belief but business need that he was
being asked to look into my store? No. and I should have been mature to realize
that I needed that help. Ego has no place in the industry. You show results.
Results speak for you and your efforts.
Of course, I met store managers who themselves spoke / boasted about
their stores in the hope of getting attention / promotion for themselves and
you cannot be judgmental and say that what they did was shallow. It wasn’t. In
a space of 40 store managers, you have to open your mouth and blow your own
trumpet. But I understood that there are some things you cannot do, because
they are dead against your nature. Even now, after everything, I would still
not be comfortable talking about my success to boss or any other
person. So what did I learn? Results speak for themselves. Efforts are seen,
maybe even acknowledged, but never recognized if not translated into results.
In the end numbers speak. But no one is paid for efforts alone. The balance
scorecard used to measure a store manager’s performance does not have a
yardstick for efforts put in. it has benchmarks for numbers – sales, profits, bottom
lines, attrition rate( yes, even people management is measurable and measured).

I moved to Pune after a lot of false
alarms. When I interacted with some other store managers in the later stages,
they told me exactly how much they used to pester area managers for shifting them to
other regions. I never did. Why? Was he God or the demon I was scared of? MY
FOURTH MISTAKE – Escalating your issues to your bosses and super bosses is not
a crime but a necessity. In handling 40 other stores and their managers, did I
expect my area manager to keep a track of what was happening to my career path? Of
course not.

My learning – in the mesh- mash of the retail
world, you need to shout…maybe not loudly…but shout anyway to be heard. No one
is a mind reader, least of all your bosses. You want something, you be
shameless and ask for it. What was the worst that could happen? He would ask me
to be patient? But at least it would be registered somewhere in his mind. (This
was my dad s advice that I kept ignoring).

Then I moved to Pune, I realized,
had a completely different work culture, bordering on laziness. As young, fresh
and vibrant my team was in Mumbai, that old (in the system), lazy, laid back
my team was in Pune. The farther you are from the head office, the lesser the
control it has on processes and systems. It was in Pune that I was first
introduced to my fear of Delegation – MY FIFTH MISTAKE. I knew I had to
delegate my work. Yes, in understood that, but some controlling tendency in me
did not let me do it. To the extent, that I hated my job. Every
decision was mine, every effort was mine and as long as the staff did not have
to work, they were happy. It was a vicious cycle where I did not delegate, the
staff did not work, I thought the staff did not work and hence I did not
delegate.

My learning – running a store is like
running a mini city. Everything from housekeeping, staff problems, customer
issues, merchandising, cleanliness, warehousing depends on you. And if the
mayor of a city was alone expected to do everything what kind of cities would
we have?

From day one at another store I continued my
mistake of not delegating, either to ADMs, DMs or staff. I am no super woman. I
read somewhere that a good manager is one who trains his team in such a way
that even if he is absent, the team works as a whole, he is not a cog of the
wheel as is believed, without whom the wheel cannot move forward. In this
sense, I failed miserably. MY SIXTH MISTAKE – it takes a lot of courage for me
to actually ask myself this question – Did I bother training even ONE person in
any of my team thoroughly? My honest answer would be No. because I never
thought any one of them was capable of that kind of work. Now that I think
about it, instead of complaining to my mom about how inadequate my managers
were, /could I have trained them better? Couldn't I have given them realistic expectations;
concrete actions, fundamental training, and then measured their results? Wouldn't that have made my job easier?

My learning – everyone is not born with
retail experience and process expertise. The most important job of a store
manager is not sales. Sales happen anyway. Sales do not depend on the store manager. The most important job is to train my
team. Starting with my ADMS and DMs. If
they would have been trained properly, my tactical workload would have been
reduced to half, leaving me with time to train the staff on merchandising
standards, SOPs, so that the staff could take merchandising decisions on their
own, so that the staff could be trained for appraisals. Why does Pune staff not
qualify for appraisals for promotion to next level? It is solely the failure of
the store managers. Store managers who have been given the resources to train
the staff, but do not have the time to because they are doing a department
managers job, who is in turn doing the assistant department managers job, who are
in turn no better equipped than the sales staff.

. A store manager needs to be a
disciplinarian, a headmaster hated but feared. You help the staff in the time
of In all the stores, I tended to slack off on the discipline after the initial
few days. I do blame myself but I also feel it is because when you work at a
place for more than 10 hours and you are alienated, because you are the boss,
you have no colleagues, you tend to get bored alone, is why you start
interacting more and more with the staff and the discipline slacks off. But how could I have let my personal reason of
boredom come in the way of my professional conduct? As crude as it sounds, it
is very important that the line between you and the other managers as well as
the staff is clear at all points. It does sound extremely crude, but that it
what matters. Only tough managers can get things done. I would rather have
people hate me, but do their work for the fear of me, than love me and not do
their work knowing that I am their ‘friend’.

I proudly told my parents that 3 people
cried at my farewell. I realize now, I would have been happier if 5 people had
cried out of joy that I was finally leavingtheir need, no doubt, you teach them
everything that they need to know about the job, but if the job is not done in
spite of the training, they should be taken to task. I failed on the training
front, so there was no question of taking them to task on something they didn’t
know how to do in the first place.

Lastly, coming to the final problem I faced
during handover.

I had never received such a handover (I did
not demand it either because I did not know the process). But I had to give a
thorough handover. The stock discrepancies which came up had come up before and
had been mailed to my area manager. Sent items deleted and my boss putting his hands up
– that taught me MY SEVENTH MISTAKE – the importance of escalations.

If my area manager did not let me show the
discrepancy in the stock takes, what stopped me from approaching regional manager, if he
did not help why not head of operations, my CEO? My learning – when you are the
sole person in charge of an entity like a store, it is very important to get
the albatross off your neck, basically pass on the responsibility or at least
the information higher up, beyond your boss if issues are not solved.
Escalation of every tiny, trivial event is important, and for the very basic
reason – SYOA! Save your own Ass! Documentation and escalation is the key.

I entered the company believing that I
would make an excellent store manager, half way through the journey I thought I
was really doing a good job, then the more I learnt, the more I realized that I
was doing a half decent job and I leave the company thinking there was so much
more to learn, and all that I have seen is the tip of the iceberg.

But I am not disappointed. I consider
myself lucky that at the age of 24 I got to handle 3 very different stores, set
up one store, manage a team of 40 people and though I come out of it a little
bit bummed, but not crushed. I can now appreciate the fact as to why most of
the store managers are 30 years of age and above. It requires a great deal of
maturity, a far bigger view of the whole picture, a lot of experience, to
actually call yourself a good store manager.

However, through it all I emerge a confident
manager. I accept all that I have done wrong; I see how it went all wrong. And
I know the mistakes that I will never commit henceforth. Yes, it was a world I
could not properly fit in as I expected on my first day of the job. But it was
a world I could become a part of, if I had persisted.

It was, however, without doubt, the
greatest learning experience of my life.